Freelance Camp TO

Went to Freelance Camp TO almost 2 weeks ago, and was very impressed by the speakers and the crowd the event drew. So first off, I’d like to express a major thank you to all the organizers, sponsors and volunteers!

I met a lot of interesting people and again, I found I was the only MISt present. (Note to info professionals: if we want people to understand the value of what we do, we really need to get out more! And don’t be shy. When I went to the Health 2.0, everyone I met admitted they love librarians.)

Anyways, being the informationista that I am, I have compiled a handy bibliography after the “cut” based on resources from the Toronto Public Library. Resources here focus on beginner freelancers but some resources should be useful to all levels; please feel free to leave suggestions in the comments as well!

personalizing versus randomizing the web

Facebook’s recent plans and developments and Google’s social search have made me think more about the increasing loss of random connections on the internet through personalization. This idea of randomness stands in direct opposition to the kind of “serendipitous” relevance you find on places like Amazon or Last.fm where relevance is defined by the choices you’ve made and the choices of your friends.

Query analysis, or: How I learned to love metadata

I won’t lie, cataloguing class was not something that I enjoyed. I will admit to wanting to burn the AACR2 on more than a few occasions out of frustration. So it’s ironic that for work, I end up thinking about metadata and FISO. All of the time. And I like it.

A utopic dystopia

I recently read Randy Connolly‘s The Persistence and Rise of the Technological Community Ideal, in which he traces the history of the distinctly American vision of a utopic society populated by technologically connected citizens living in far flung geographic spaces. He draws his conclusions from a variety of technologies, from canals and telegraphs to online communities. It’s worth reading just for the awesome quotes, some of which are downright evangelical.

I’m willing to bet that there is also fertile ground to do historical research with American records in the opposite vein – technophobic and perhaps fire and brimstone like proclamations – by which some of the very same technologies Connolly writes of are also described as the downfall of society, the erosion of humanity and the sign of the beginning of the end. (On a side note, not even the most fearful of the internet would have probably predicted the awful yet strangely awesome rise of Teh Interwebs and all its shocking artifacts…) This is a narrative where technology alienates people from each other and from any sense of community, strips them of their ability to analyze, create and emote, breeds an amoral vacuum.

Congress of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

It’s been awhile since I’ve attended an academic conference. I love conferences, and seeing how different fields draw different personality types. I’d forgotten how common it is in academia for a presenter to simply read an entire, densely constructed paper, no fancy powerpoints, no handouts, nada.

Although I wasn’t expecting to speak to anyone about information studies, I did end up discussing constructing subjectivity and self online, public vs commerical internet space, and social capital. Continental philosophy is often criticized for being too jargon laden, lacking in “seriousness” etc. and I have seen this to be the case at times. However, the theories I have read that have most helped me to understand the “real world” – in particular to understand democracy and the nation state – come from the continental tradition.

Being in a professional program, I find students often are frustrated with theory, most often because the theories they study do not acknowledge the day to day obstacles, compromises and lack of resources required to consider or apply theory. However, the idea that the practical world is wholly objective and divorced from theories, that notion that theory is a foreign entity that must somehow be overlaid onto practice or “applied to” is inaccurate and leads people to believe that by solely focusing on practice, they are functioning in some kind of “ideology-free” space where the values and things of their practice are simply what they are (always have been and always will be). Perhaps we could stop thinking of theory and practice as binary opposites, but rather, consider them as entities that interpenetrate each other and are inseparable.

Community Informatics: another student’s perspective

Looks like I’m not the only one wondering about the limitations of CI practice. Reflections from the University of Illinois’s CI Initiative blog:

“Can Community Informatics happen in a community when the community is a cacophonous community? Within this question lies a host of other questions, such as can community informatics happen when state government officials do not support or desire to fund initiatives by community members to cure social ills? Or when rural areas of a community are located an hour away from the urban areas where special interest and grassroots organizations often forget about them? At what point is it impossible for CI to happen?”

Read the full post here.

Web 2.0: thoughts beyond the shiny rhetoric

We all know what’s so great about web 2.0. It’s democratic, user driven, community based, open, user-friendly… like the internet just opened up a whole bulk sized can of awesome. I started to rethink this line of thought after reading Nick Dyer-Witheford’s book chapter “Cycles of Net Struggle, Lines of Net Flight” in Information Technology in Librarianship, and his overview of the development of web communications viewed through a Marxist lens. Contrary to popular conceptions of web 2.0, his notion of this movement is viewed as a “re-appropriation of immaterial labor”; in essence, 2.0 is a form of digital sharecropping, adding a deeper dimension to web 2.0 that underlies the surface of its community-led ethos. Basically, while everyone contributes their labour for free,the absentee landlords of the net sit back and rake in the profits.

Community Informatics: state vs the people?

from to bear witness

One of the greatest conflicts I experience in my work that has no resolution in sight, is the tension between serving communities and working within the structures of state power. One of the starkest examples I can offer is the misapplication of state funding in community projects, which I have seen wasted due to a variety of reasons including mismanagement, corruption, and by far the worst: stringent and/or impractical deliverables imposed by the funding parties or institutional bodies that work at cross purposes with the needs of community members for the purposes of accountability.

What I have read about Community Informatics and its community led approaches and values fascinates me because you really cannot escape state power. It seems to me that the spaces by which a community can resist and challenge the state, or negotiate and debate institutional policies erode in proportion to the size, degree and quality of threat a community or CI project creates. There is a limit at which compromises are no longer tenable.

6 months already, go figure

I have to admit, all my information related ideas are being funneled directly into papers, leaving me with little material to post! I thought I’d restart with a shift towards more pragmatic posts…

On my end, I’ve been quite busy, already gearing up for the next semester. I’ll be the new student liason for CASLIS next year, am exploring strengthening student ties with APRA, and am happy to say that I’ve reconnected with TIG, as a consultant again, but this time regarding donor/gift development. On a side note about prospect research, the amount of publicly available information about donors is really incredible. Is there a word for the issues arising from aggregating personally identifiable public data? If not, there really should be. We still frequently call this a “privacy” issue, which is a total misnomer.

I’m also excited to be going to the CLA conference this year. My advice to new students regarding conference grants is to apply, apply, apply. Your chances of receiving funding are excellent. Also, if you are nervous about going alone or networking alone, just think that many people in attendance are friendly, helpful librarians! I really can’t imagine a nicer crowd to network with. I’ve found that people in the library field are usually supportive of new professionals and are generous in nature – so you can dispel any preconceptions about conferences being an exhausting schmooze-fest and get excited about meeting people who want to share their work and expertise with you. So keep your eyes on your inbox and apply already!

current projects

1. My classmates and I had roughly a month to put together an online system for aboriginal archival photos. The “beta” site is available @ student2.fis1311.ischool.utoronto.ca. It’s linked up to Flickr so that users can help ID persons and places etc. but Archon is in place to allow an archivist or staff member of an aboriginal organization to filter through redundancies, spelling errors and the dross that can make user generated content problematic for information search.

Archon is open source, and it’s pretty easy to use once it’s been installed. It works very well with photos, although I had other classmates who experienced difficulty with trying to upload audio content. I’ve been discussing this system with the head librarian at the special Spadina branch at the TPL, and we’ll see if any northern aboriginal organizations I get in touch with might find this a useful solution. Go F/OSS! [update: No volunteer labour allowed at TPL's Spadina branch unfortunately!]

2. Have been slowly working towards a fundraiser for the SHSS library w/the Child & Youth Advocacy group at my faculty. The first thing I want to buy the students is the Twilight series! And Halo books. On a side note, I finally learned how to play Halo and have no idea what kind of appeal a Halo BOOK would have, but it was honestly the only thing I could convince the younger male students @ SHSS to read. [update: A whole slew of books were shipped up. Apparently the Twilight ones have flown off the shelves!]

3. I’m working on a paper that I hope to eventually submit to our faculty’s open source journal. For some reason, my profs have always assumed that I was going to pursue the academic track, speaking as if academia was some kind of inevitability to me, as natural as aging. But despite my theoretical bent, my goals have always been advocacy, community outreach, etc. Working with organizations like TakingITGlobal, the Inuvik Youth Centre, etc. Theory has really informed that type of practical work for me. Obviously not directly, but certainly from an ideological/philosophical perspective, the influence of which is very profound. [update: I changed my mind and decided to submit a different article to FIQ]